I first visited Shuggie’s Trash Pie + Natural Wine on New Year’s Eve in 2022 while on assignment for Bon Appétit. We’d been hearing good things about this Mission District pizza spot with a radical approach to reducing food waste, and with its maximalist decor, my editor thought it would photograph well. I was charmed by the whole kit and kaboodle: the psychedelic, glitter-dusted DIY interiors; the house party atmosphere, with patrons (including my mother) doing shots of natural wine from a porrón; the affection owners Kayla Abe and David Murphy had for one another; and their beefy bulldog, Beef.
But I was especially taken with the restaurant’s raison d’etre. Abe and Murphy weren’t just turning carrot tops into pesto or dehydrating citrus scraps for cocktail garnishes like many restaurants gesturing toward sustainability. They had designed Shuggie’s to actively absorb food waste from farmers, fishermen and commercial manufacturers. They rescued fish collars and heads from seafood processing facilities. A plate of fried pickles might feature Halloween pumpkins normally destined for the dumpster. Steak-and-potatoes bros could even find beef on the menu — beef heart meatballs, but still, beef. Somehow they never sacrificed deliciousness for virtue.
There was only one thing I wasn’t wild about at Shuggie’s Trash Pie + Natural Wine: the pie. With the exception of some occasionally wilty lettuces, nothing else on the menu felt like a compromise. But the pizza dough, made with leftover oat flour (from oat milk manufacturing) and whey (from cheesemaking), had few of the qualities I wanted from pizza crust. It was fine, a crisp flatbread-y vehicle for toppings, but nowhere near as noteworthy as Murphy’s other dishes.
The restaurant, I’m happy to report, is better than ever, both in terms of the food and its ability to serve its sustainability mission.
The problem with the trash pies from the restaurant’s perspective, Abe told me, was that many diners who weren’t me wanted pizza and only pizza — specifically pepperoni pizza, which was not made with unwanted pork offal and offcuts but regular ‘roni. Remove the comfortable option from the equation, Abe and Murphy reasoned, and customers would be pushed to order the dishes designed to maximize food waste absorption.
Fear not, there’s plenty of comfort on the new menu. Onion peel “funyuns,” a must order for Cheetos and Pirates Booty devotees, are wonderfully airy, crunchy snacks shaped like pool noodles ($9). Drag them through a creamy mushroom dip, served in a ceramic vessel that resembles the Rolling Stones’ tongue and lips logo. There are also fish sticks ($18) that look extremely cheffy, with tweezered microgreens and pillowy puffs of herb stem espuma, but taste like the frozen fish sticks of your childhood dreams. Whenever he gets a big haul of white fish odds and ends, Murphy makes bacalao-style salt cod, then freezes the sticks and fries them to order.
Also excellent, when in season, is a salad of tomatoes and stone fruit ($14). The secret to Shuggie’s food waste formula is to create a dish so full of flavor and texture that it can compensate for less than flawless produce, and the zippy dressing and fried shallot and peanut topping do just that. Is it better on days when the fruit is on the verge of turning as opposed to days when it’s underripe? Certainly, but the accoutrements cover a multitude of sins.
I’d skip the beef three ways ($42). The braised beef cheeks are lovely, but the sweetbreads skewed soggy and the filet mignon offcuts — well, if you came here to eat filet mignon, there’s been some confusion. Lean into the Shuggie’s mission and order something that sounds like garbage. And if you must have pizza? They’re still making it once a week, during Sunday jazz nights.